It’s a puzzling thing, I thought, I was getting more “media literate” as I was rewatching a lot of the old movies and TV shows I saw as a teenager. Not only was I more perceptive and familiar with the techniques used in the details - the cinematography, the music, the dialog, etc, but I also understood that there was more to it. There was the subtext, then there was the context. There was structure and all of it was deliberate. This whole idea that I was somehow getting better at viewing and understanding film came crashing down with me rewatching Wong Kar-wai.

My first film by the famed director was Chungking Express (1994), mostly because of a YouTube video where Quentin Tarantino was raving about Faye and the way she was shot in the film. The shot with a frame rate trick effect of the cop drinking coffee while Faye looks at him almost frozen in time remains freshly etched into the grooves of my brain despite some very challenging few years of sudden adulthood. Wong Kar-wai’s shots seem to linger in your mind, the story itself, not so much for me. I have a really bad memory and I have seen so many films just for the sake of it. All of it has become a jumbled mess in there, even then, this shot itself (and many others) for some reason is preserved in all its beauty and keeps popping into my mind’s eye for seemingly no reason at all. This is what prompted me to revisit the movie and along with it all of the director’s work. For my revisit though, I decided to start with - In the Mood for Love (2000), as this is the movie I hear mentioned more in discussions about the filmmaker. And almost the very instant you start watching the movie, it kind of becomes obvious why.

Simply put, the film is dripping with style. Even in my jumbled memory, I remembered Hong Kong. It’s a hard place to forget especially if you have seen it through Wong’s work. Set in 1962, Hong Kong seems just as fascinating if not more in In the Mood for Love, as it does in Chungking Express. The movie at its core is about love, that much may be clear from the title. It is about forbidden love as I understood it, love that the way I see it everyone experiences at some time in their lives.

At this point, I was about to describe the plot of the movie objectively, as I collected all my notes and sat down to write it all down though, I realized, that I don’t really have much of a grip on the story of these movies and that it was rarely the point to me. This prompted me to read up on him. All kinds of essays have been written about these movies, making greater points about the political state of Indonesia and some such things. But I remember the rain and the cigarettes.

With more reading (and YouTube watching) I came to learn that Wong Kar-wai did not follow traditional filmmaking techniques when he made these films, it was a sort of improvisation, an “on-set discovery process”. I’m quoting from this great blog on his improvisational techniques:

Even the lines between the actors, the chemistry between them, the conflicts and development of the whole story, and even the ending remain undetermined until the filming process really finishes. It works exactly that way, Wong only has in mind the themes, a few summary lines as to what his movie will be about, and that’s it. Unplanned, and open to any directions chances may bring him, Wong leisurely proceeds with shooting his movie

This made me rethink a lot of what I thought I understood about great film and how to interpret them. I had gotten so much out of these movies, Fallen Angels for example, came to me at a time when loneliness had cascaded into much bigger problems in my life and I didn’t even know it. Fallen Angels helped me see through the walls of denial I had put up for myself. (If you’re going to watch this one I recommend doing so with discretion, due to my roommate walking in at exactly the right moment, this film also established me as a film eccentric.)

I felt every scene in the film was intentional, the complete structure - deliberate and most probably developed from a personal story, I would not have thought that the film came to be with only a rough outline, the rest being figured out on the go.

This reframing of one of my favorite director’s methodology has helped me develop a similar one for myself when it comes to my own technical work or creative side projects that are rarely finished.

As I have come to operate in a reflection of Wong’s techniques, I’m starting to think the reason these projects get stuck in limbo is my lack of improvisation. I find myself checking off goals in career and hobbies the more I operate like this. I hope this continues.

My mind really likes Wong Kar-wai’s films, because a lot of the times this is how I see the world with my messed up memory and a dreamlike perception of time (okay maybe it’s not that stylistic). I always knew this was the reason I liked all the framing, effects and style in his movies but maybe the structure or the deliberate lack of it is something I can learn from too and should not have ignored for so long.